Steiner: Virginia City (CD review)

Also, The Beast with Five Fingers; The Lost Patrol. William Stromberg, Moscow Symphony Orchestra. Marco Polo 8.223870.

This is not a soundtrack album. Thank goodness. I remember coming out of a big, THX-equipped movie theater recently and finding that my ears were ringing from the overloud, over-bright sound. Later in the week I noticed a newspaper ad for the CD of a particular movie soundtrack, exclaiming that the digitally remastered sound was "just like in a theater!" No thank you. It wasn't that I couldn't have enjoyed the movie's sound if it weren't so loud or bright; I just didn't want it sounding like that in my living-room stereo system. The fact is, movie-theater sonics belong in a movie theater, where their glaring, aggressive noises do the most good, not in my music room.

By contrast, Max Steiner's film music on this Marco Polo CD, played by the Moscow Symphony, sounds like just what it is: movie music played by a real orchestra in a live setting. It's a relief to hear it after going to the movies as much as I do and listening to so much deafening soundtrack music.  End of rant.

Max Steiner (1888-1971), often regarded as the "father of film music," came to Hollywood in 1929 and registered his first big hit with King Kong (1933), which was among the very first films to use an extensive, original musical score specific to the movie. Then Steiner went on to do practically every big picture the Warner Bros. studio made in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, finally slowing down and finishing his career in the early Sixties.

If the opening bars of The Lost Patrol (1934) remind you of Casablanca (1942), you'd be right.  Steiner did the Bogart film just eight years later, and there's much the same flavor here. The music for The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), on the other hand, Peter Lorre's hand to be precise, is lurid and melodramatic; it was one of the only horror films Steiner ever scored. But the real gem is the Errol Flynn movie, Virginia City (1940), filled with melodies that might have made Aaron Copland envious.

The music for all three films, arranged, restored, and reconstructed by John Morgan, fits into suites of twenty or more minutes each, and they provide a good cross section of the scores Steiner produced for almost four decades in Hollywood.

Marco Polo's sound is quite natural, maybe a little distant and a little soft on detail but delivering good depth and imaging. The album makes an attractive deal for movie buffs as well as music lovers, and it provides a welcome antidote for listeners whose heads are throbbing from typical movie soundtracks.

JJP